The Distributor Channel

Are you sticking to your business New Year’s resolutions? Or should I back up and ask if you even made any resolutions in your business? I recently read that about 72.4 million Americans (18 and older) were planning to make resolutions for 2020.  Here are the top five resolutions: 1. Exercise more 2. Lose Weight 3. Save money or at least spend less of it 4. Learn a new skill or hobby 5. Quit smoking Notice how none of these are business-related? Sure, you might want to save money if you are one of the top dogs at your organization, but most salespeople aren’t as concerned. While you likely set goals for the year, goals are different than resolutions. Goals are measurable and come with a timeline.  Things that might fall under goals include: 1. Monthly/Quarterly sales numbers 2. Number of weekly sales calls 3. Number of new customers obtained 4. Percentage of Gross margin achieved 5. Number of vacation days scheduled I bet I surprised you with that last one. Time

Over the past year, I have been called to assist distributors and their supply partners in developing new and innovative marketing plans. I laid out a few of these plans last year in an article for Industrial Supply Magazine called It’s time to rethink Joint Marketing Plans. It seems at least a few others are thinking about distributor marketing as well. Rivet/MRO, a blog site sponsored by an organization providing software to track co-op funds, piggybacked my article and said this, “The fact is, most independent distributors have limited marketing expertise…” They go on to provide additional information on how and why distributors spend money on logoed promotional items and how-to better use co-op funds in general. You can read it here .  Just as implied by my Industrial Supply article, it is time for distributor marketing to move forward - first, move into a position of strategic thinking and second, improve to become a tool whose effectiveness can be measured